Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  The attack came at 4.30 a.m. on 31 October. German bugles began to sound and lanterns began flashing. ‘With the first dull streaks of light’ they came on. Nine hundred cavalrymen, strung out on a ridiculously long front with newly arrived Indian troops, faced some 6,000 Germans. Driven out of the trenches east of the village, the British fell back into Messines itself. Enemy troops followed, dragging a battery with them. Francis and his men retired, crawling from house to house, surrounded. The Ninth convened on the road by the local cemetery. German shells had set the village around them on fire. ‘Smoke clouds rose from every quarter of the town. A dozen houses were ablaze, the flames leaping high in the light breeze.’ The air was a ‘mass of rending flashes. Shock succeeded shock, and deadly missiles fell like hail.’

  Francis found Lennie Harvey and his troops and gave him orders to hold the position to his left. At the edge of the town, Francis himself turned with some of his squadron and began heading back down the approach trench. One trooper was baffled. ‘I didn’t know where the Captain was going, but he said , “come on”. It looked to me as if he was starting off to take the bally trenches back with a bloomin’ pistol.’ Francis had heard that men had been left behind and he was determined to go to their aid.

  The first territorials had already arrived at the front, including the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. Amongst their number was Valentine Fleming, MP for Henley. He had been hanging about Dunkirk and St Omer for a number of weeks before, on 30 October, in pouring rain the regiment was told to saddle up and move. After riding all night they dug reserve trenches all morning behind Messines. This he described as disagreeable whilst shells whizzed overhead and exploded ‘with a disgusting regularity’. Exposed, the shrapnel shells fortunately exploded behind them whilst Black Maria fell short in front, so although ‘horribly frightened’ they were lucky not to be far more severely hit. As they held fast on the left of the 9th Lancers, the Germans closed to within 500 yards. ‘They kept pooping away at our squadrons on the left of the barricade’ Fleming complained. ‘We began to wonder how to use the bloody bayonets with which we had been issued two days previously!’ As Gheluvelt fell, the British at Messines battled on.

  Back at Gheluvelt, Sir John French, commanding the BEF, was talking about going up to the front and being slaughtered with everyone else. Douglas Haig’s Chief of Staff, another Etonian and Victoria Cross recipient named ‘Johnnie’ Gough was holding it together slightly better, declaring something along the lines of ‘it [don’t] matter a damn what happens, God won’t let those devils win’. Fitzclarence too, commanding the 1st Guards Brigade, was of a mind to halt the impending doom rather than morbidly embracing it.

  Shortly after Gheluvelt was overrun, Regie Fletcher had been sent up to the lines to try and range 118th Battery’s guns. On the way he met an officer of another unit with two NCOs who were off to do similar work and they walked together for about a mile to a dugout behind some trenches being manned by the Cameron Highlanders. When they got to the front they realised that the telephone wire was broken and so they set to work trying to repair it.

  Behind them, the remnants of the 2nd Worcesters, some 350 surviving men and seven officers, had been sent to Fitzclarence to reinforce his rapidly diminishing brigade. Shortly before 2.p.m., determined to try to rectify the situation, he led them out, south-east and back towards the Menin Road. Leaving him at the edge of some woods, the ragged battalion advanced bravely towards the chateau and Gheluvelt itself. As soon as they reached the open country men began to fall. Decimated, they advanced past bodies, equipment, shell holes and other battlefield debris. Shaken, the Germans began to fall back. The gap in the line had been plugged at a cost of almost 200 men. The Worcesters were heroes. Fitzclarence would be credited as the man who turned the tide. The German line would eventually reform further back, but disaster had been averted, for now.

  In the meantime, nearby, an excitable Regie Fletcher and his colleagues had just about finished ranging their guns when news came through to say that their batteries were to retire. They were to return at once. Jumping out of their dugout they made a dash for the woods. Seventy yards into their sprint there was a rush overhead, followed by the telltale miaow as a shell burst and sent a cascade of shrapnel flying overhead.

  The situation at Messines remained grave. The regiment on Valentine Fleming’s left was all but wiped out, the 9th Lancers on his right badly battered. He and his Oxfordshire horsemen were finally relieved at 4.30 a.m. on 1 November and staggered 2 miles back to find breakfast. Their food was just about ready when Beau de Lisle arrived to inform them that the line had been broken and that they must participate in a counter-attack. ‘This bloody prospect made us sick,’ recalled Fleming. He was categorically not impressed. The trenches they stepped into were bloodied and full of corpses. ‘You can have my share of glory in exchange for one Turkish bath, one game of squash,’ he commented drily. His opinion of war did not get any better. He told a friend that, while it may be ‘bloody’ in England it is positively ‘f**king in France’.

  The line around Messines finally stabilised. Nobody had seen a thing of Lennie Harvey since Francis had met him by the cemetery and Francis himself had been wounded again. Having been pushed out of the town Douglas Harvey and the remainder of the 9th Lancers helped to dig in to the west of the town. His family had been shrouded in tragedy. A sister had died in 1897, followed by his mother whilst he and Lennie were at Eton in 1908. Just a few months later their younger brother Ian had caught pneumonia and died in the sanitorium at school aged 13. His father had now to contend with the loss of his eldest son, for Lennie was never heard of again and nobody was able to shed any light upon the 23 year old’s fate. If he had an inkling that his brother was dead, Douglas would never know for sure. On 3 November, just three days after his brother vanished, a high-explosive shell whistled across from the direction of Messines and scored a direct hit on him and several of his men. Douglas, 22 years old, was carried out of the battered trench and laid to rest in Dranouter churchyard three days after his brother was killed.

  The first battle for Ypres cost the British dearly. In just over six weeks nearly 60,000 men were wounded or taken prisoner and 8,000 killed. The BEF had been wiped out. Only nine of eighty-four battalions had more than 300 men and eighteen were at cadre strength; less than a hundred. Amongst the fallen were well over a hundred Old Etonians, almost the same figure as for the whole of the Boer War. They came from forty-five different units. Sixteen had died on 29 October alone; the vast majority of them at the crossroads on the Menin Road. Not surprisingly, the Grenadiers and the Coldstream suffered the heaviest losses of OE; the four Guards regiments accounted for forty-eight casualties alone. Owing to the heavy toll exacted on the Blues and Royals more than half of Eton’s deaths from mounted regiments came from the Household Cavalry.

  There were the more experienced casualties, such as Fitzclarence, nearly thirty years in the army, who became the first Etonian general to fall during the Great War. His grave was lost in the subsequent fighting and he became the highest-ranked soldier of the 54,406 men commemorated on the Menin Gate at Ypres. There were veterans of the Boer War such as Lord Wellesley, whose wife was six months pregnant with their second daughter when he fell and there were volunteers, such as Gerald Anderson, the Olympic hurdler and reservist who was killed assaulting a German trench. Then there were the youngest casualties: nineteen-year-old Jack Lee Steere, who had fallen just weeks after learning of the death of his best friend Jack Cunliffe on the Aisne; 24-year-old Lord Congleton who had sought to solve the riddle of John Manners’ fate, mischievous and adventurous; he became the first member of the House of Lords to fall in the war. Neville Woodroffe, 21, who had survived Villers-Cotterêts and the Aisne was killed advancing side by side with the Household Cavalry on 6 November; another of Hubert Brinton’s boys. Carleton ‘Laddie’ Tufnell, 22, had been the biggest blood at Eton in 1911, a sporting great and captain of the XI. He was shot through the throat whilst trying
to hold back the advancing enemy on the same day. The list being read out in the chapel at Eton went on, and on, and on.

  In all, fifty-two Old Etonians would fall serving with the artillery during the war, three quarters of them with the Royal Field Artillery. Reginald William Fletcher was the first. The efforts to save him after he was struck by shrapnel running back to his battery failed. He died within two hours, at about 5 o’clock on 31 October 1914. That evening, one of his best friends, serving with another artillery unit, dug him a grave and laid him to rest under a tree in the gardens of the chateau near Veldhoek. Like Fitzclarence, four years of dogged fighting in the area destroyed any marker and he was ultimately commemorated on the Menin Gate.

  Whilst still on the Aisne, Regie had sat down to contemplate death in his diary. At the front he thought it was ‘a cheap and common thing’ and that it was no use trying to avoid it. ‘If you avoid today a road … being shelled,’ he reasoned, ‘you may be caught tomorrow by a splinter of Black Maria while you are washing … Something always manages to come along when I have got nothing on but one sock and an identity disc.’ He recalled chatter at Balliol after a heavy night of drinking champagne when the subject had come up. ‘[Death] seemed an awful thing; complete extinction and the end of everything one enjoyed on earth – a thing to prepare oneself for all one’s life with much thought and meditation.’

  War had changed Regie’s outlook:

  Now, when the prospect … of a very speedy end is ever present, one does not spend time thinking about it … One realises that it is not really an awful thing … but one event of small significance that may happen at any odd time. It is not so much extinction as the consummation of life, and can make little difference to one’s real existence.

  He was almost resigned to it:

  I am convinced that if I am killed tomorrow, I shall still be able to realise some satisfaction from the sight of my Sam Browne belt suspended from my oar-handle in the den … and shall still be able to talk to Muncles. Its queer how circumstances will change one’s ideas completely.’

  Regie died convinced that victory was imminent. The author of a nationally accepted history textbook, the poignancy of that moment in time was not lost on his father:

  Regie was hit at the very hour on the very day on which the future of the first battle of Ypres turned with the successful charge of the Worcesters on Gheluvelt. In that turn of fortune hung the whole future history of the world.

  Notes

  1 Exit all.

  2 A bend on the course at the Henley Regatta.

  3 Valentine Fleming would fall on 20 May 1917 whilst defending an advanced post at Guillemont with his men outnumbered nearly three to one. He left behind a widow and four sons, including the future creator of James Bond, 8-year-old Ian.

  Ypres and the surrounding area.

  6

  ‘To Die Would Be an Awfully Big Adventure’

  More Etonians with literary connections played their part in the Great War too: Charles Dickens’ grandson went straight to France in 1914 and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s would serve with the Rifle Brigade, whilst Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley would also serve; but it was a less conventional connection that dragged one of the writing celebrities of the day into the conflict.

  James Matthew Barrie was born in Scotland in 1860. Relocating to London in the early 1890s he eventually moved to Gloucester Road with his wife and their dog Porthos, just a short walk away from Kensington Gardens. A large, sprawling escape for Londoners, it was full of nannies wheeling perambulators whilst their elder charges scampered alongside. One day in 1897, by which time he was becoming an established writer, Barrie was walking his dog when he made the acquaintance of two little boys wearing distinctive, red tam-o’-shanters. The eldest, George, was a beautiful, dark-haired little boy; cocky, obnoxious, honest and inquisitive without a hint of self-consciousness; all the qualities that Barrie thought wondrous in small children.

  As his star rose, the author had all the time in the world for his friends’ children, filling the void where his own might have been. One of his first cohorts had been Bevil Quiller-Couch, who in 1914 was the young officer who had dug his friend Regie Fletcher’s grave in the gardens of Veldhoek Chateau; but the Llewelyn Davies brothers would become increasingly influential in Barrie’s eyes. He became acquainted with their parents; their father Arthur, a handsome barrister who had been a master at Eton for a single year and their mother, the beautiful Sylvia Du Maurier, sister to Gerald and aunt of Daphne. Engaged within weeks of meeting, the couple’s family grew quickly after they married. George was born in 1893, Jack, the only brother who would not go to Eton, followed. Peter joined them in 1897, Michael in 1900 and the family was complete when ‘Nico’ was born in 1903.

  Barrie had long been incorporating friends and acquaintances into his work. With George he would concoct stories, the little boy pressing his hands to his temples to ‘remember’ what it was like to be a baby. In 1902 Barrie published The Little White Bird, based on their friendship. On a family holiday in Surrey in 1901 the three eldest boys were given the roles of ‘the boy castaways’ and he took innumerable research photographs of how they might behave on their own little island. He played the evil pirate, George hunted with a bow and Peter walked the plank. Once again, in 1903, based in part on their castaway games, Barrie sat down to write; this time a play. Rehearsals began in October 1904 under a blanket of secrecy. Actors hardly knew the title of the work as they underwent ‘flying’ lessons on wires above the stage.

  The curtain rose on Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up at 8.30 p.m. on 27 December 1904 at the Duke of York’s theatre. Each of the Davies boys, who had attended rehearsals and practiced flying for themselves, had lent their name to a character; George Darling, Peter Pan, Michael Nicholas Darling and John Darling. The eldest three in particular had been Barrie’s inspiration. The ‘spark’ had come from them and the play had been forged by ‘rubbing the fire of [them] violently together, as savages with two sticks produced a flame’. Barrie himself was completely unsure as to how this labour of love would be received, and yet Peter Pan was a success before the curtain fell. When the actress playing Peter asked the mainly adult audience to clap if they believed in fairies the response was so overwhelming that she burst into tears.

  For George and his brothers, the frivolity of fairies and pirates, and their childhood, receded into the background when their father was diagnosed with cancer in his jaw in 1906. Barrie dropped everything and put himself entirely at the family’s disposal; assuming all the financial burden for the excruciating treatment that Arthur Llewelyn Davies would undergo. Despite a brutal operation that removed a large portion of his jaw and the roof of his mouth, the cancer spread. George was by now 14 and remained at home, but his father’s ‘last selfless gesture’ was to send the little ones away so that they would not see him die. He passed away in 1907 at the age of 44; a few months before George was despatched to the house of his old friend Hugh MacNaghten at Eton.

  In 1909 further tragedy engulfed the Llewelyn Davies boys. Their mother Sylvia collapsed and was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. A number of relatives were to act on behalf of her boys, but she did not want them separated and therefore it ultimately made logistical sense for the wealthy Barrie to adopt them and for their faithful nurse to remain in a prominent position. Sylvia died in 1910, aged 43, and that autumn Peter arrived at Eton, not as an Oppidan like his brother but as a Colleger.

  George was an unmitigated success at school and found a happy home with MacNaghten, far happier that Peter who lived in the teasing shadow of the character to whom he had given his name, wishing that somebody else had had the honour. George was a fine cricketer and, like Gerry Freeman-Thomas, had been a member of the XI that took on Harrow at Lord’s in 1912. The prospect of him appearing at Lord’s had excited his late mother. J.M. Barrie told George that she talked about it ‘with shining eyes’; and two years after her sad death her eldest son did not disappoin
t her. When Gerry was caught out for 64 on the first day it left his team at 116 for 4. Then Eton took a risk. For the Winchester match, the traditional precursor to Lords, George, primarily a bowler had sat at ten in the Etonian batting order. He had had a successful match. As well as taking four wickets for just eighteen runs, when George went in to bat in his only innings he had hit a curiously impressive 42. As a result, he had been bumped up to six in the order, a decision which was considered dubious by some.

  George had already made a fantastic left-handed catch that found its way into the national press along with his photograph, but it was for his batting that George was to be commended that day. He began a little shakily, nerves perhaps, and in the face of one of Harrow’s better bowlers he was failing to inspire the sweltering July crowd with any confidence. He should have been stumped for a single run, but luck was with him. Given a little time, George began to hit freely; beautifully even. Harrow had no fielders in the deep and in that situation he could begin swinging away with little risk of being out. He began hitting over the boundary and put together a string of fours, two of them in one over in ‘a most dashing innings’.

  Peter described George as having ‘absolutely no vanity at all’. He quite clearly idolised his dashing older brother. In a lot of ways George resembled their father, and was quite reserved. He was never very vocal, in fact he was rather shy, but he was charming. His sense of humour was ‘exquisite’ and when Peter arrived at Eton he was left open mouthed and in complete wonderment at his brother’s colourful language.

  George went up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1912 and Peter was about to follow when war was declared. He was at the OTC camp at Mytchett Farm and when it was turned out he hurried to Scotland where George and the rest of his brothers had joined Barrie for a fishing holiday. In his hand he was brandishing a circular from the adjutant of the Cambridge University OTC, ‘pointing out that it was the obvious duty of all undergraduates to offer their services’. Dutifully, that night the two brothers boarded a train going south.